asian can vs asian am

What’s the difference between Asian Canadian literature and Asian American literature? That’s the question for the first day’s panel in Taiwan. I like to think things are more fluid up here, that we use the concept of identity but don’t cling to it like a life raft. It’s problematic because to claim racialized identity is to accept the binary white/asian– very useful when one is working in oppositional mode. Opposition is necessary to force the recognition of traumatic history. But the very same binaries can be limiting when one wants to speak of other things– capital, globalization, bio-technology, machine technology, gender, nation, shopping, borders, prisons…

In the US, especially in the academy, there was much more of a push to crystallize identity for the purpose of establishing a location from which to speak, write, work, organize, as well as to get institutionalized and paid. But that doesn’t mean all Asian Americans are into this.